Hello, welcome to the Editor's Desk. This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things Magazine. I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things Magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

I'd like to welcome Daryl Paul to the podcast, and he is the author of Feminism Against Fertility

from the May 2025 issue of First Things Magazine.

Welcome to the podcast, Errol.

Hi, Rusty. Thanks for having me.

So, uh, Trump gets elected,

boys crowed, girls cried.

What, what did the, sort of the fallout from November's election, what did it reveal about our gender politics in America?

Yeah, I think that captures exactly the media coverage, that all the women in America were despondent and all the men were cheering,

right? But I think it did reveal something quite interesting, particularly about certain

maybe demographic categories, we might say, in America, that this, I think, applied particularly

to younger women and younger men, and youngness

tends to correlate highly with singleness, so we might say single women and single men also.

And so it was kind of an entree into thinking about a lot of the gender problems, especially

among the young in America, but also in lots of other Western and even some East Asian countries that are quite highly developed and democratic like ours, that young men and women seem to be drifting apart from one another in some pretty significant ways with some pretty significant effects as well well you

you cite the the four B movement in South Korea and there was a bit of a echo of that in social media

after the election what are the four Bs yeah so this is a movement that crops up maybe 10 years ago or so in South Korea. And

it is a feminist movement, has a pretty radical edge to it. There are debates about how

widely influential it is, but certainly it has talked about a lot. And it seems to have some real

effects on gender relations

and including some backlashes in South Korea. But anyway, the four Bs, they're probably better

translated into English as the four knows, because B is this prefix in Korean that means no. So the

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